Judi
Bari Web Site of the Redwood Summer Justice Project

Originally published in: The Nanaimo Times
Nanaimo, British Columbia January 2, 1996, A5 Copyright (c) 1996 by Kim Goldberg All Rights Reserved by Author
(goldberg@freenet.carleton.ca)

Enemies of the State

Saro-Wiwa is the latest in a string of environmentalists
to be murdered for their activism

by Kim Goldberg Nanaimo Times columnist

The November (1995) execution
of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his fellow Ogoni
tribesmen sparked a global public outcry, with Vancouver Islanders adding
their voices to the protest.

In Nanaimo, Georgia Strait Alliance returned a
$5,000 donation from the Shell Environment Fund due to the oil company's
destruction of the Ogoni homeland which Saro-Wiwa and the others were working
to protect, and for which they were killed.

In Courtenay, activists staged a demonstration
in front of the local Shell gas station.

Sadly, Saro-Wiwa's execution for the crime of
environmentalism is but the latest in a long line of similar murders targeting
key environmental activists whose work poses a significant threat to corporate
profitability.

The 1988 assassination of Chico Mendes, who led
the protest against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, is perhaps
the best known case of an environmentalist cut down for his work, although
it was just one of more than 1,000 land-related murders documented in rural
Brazil that decade by Amnesty International.

The 1995 murder of environmentalist Janeth Kawas
in Honduras occurred just a few days after she revealed that two agribusiness
companies planned to invade 15,000 hectares of an ecological reserve. She
was shot twice in the head while doing paperwork for the ecological foundation
she ran.

One year earlier, a journalist in Cambodia was
murdered two days after police warned him to stop investigating the military's
illegal involvement in the country's timber industry.

In an age when national agendas are dictated
by the needs of transnational corporations, citizens protecting the natural
resources those corporations must exploit have become the new enemies of
the state.

But the activist-victims of this frightening trend
are not limited to developing nations.

In 1993 Leroy Jackson, a prominent Navaho environmentalist,
was found dead in his van at a highway rest stop shortly before he was
scheduled to turn over evidence of illegal logging on his reservation to
the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C.

Bari began receiving a string of death threats
after she brought a coalition of millworkers and environmentalists before
local government and demanded that the county seize a logging company's
timberlands and operate them in the public interest. One month later she
was bombed.

Miraculously, Bari survived and continues to organize,
despite the FBI's suspicious cover-up and mishandling of crucial evidence
at the bomb scene. The bomber was never caught.

Each of these cases (and scores of others like
them) reveals how closely environmental protection is intertwined with
human rights, which has finally led activists from each of those movements
to begin building coalitions.

"Guaranteeing basic civil rights such as
free speech and free assembly is the best defense against both violent
repression and environmental damage," states the Worldwatch Institute
in a recent report linking human rights to the environment.

"If all the vulnerable members of society
- the impoverished, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women, children
- had access to environmental information and could exercise their right
to free speech, then potential polluters and profligate consumers would
no longer be able to treat them as expendable, and would have to seek alternatives
to their polluting activities and their overconsumption," says the
report.

And perhaps if that happens we will finally see
an end to this anti-democratic spate of lethal violence against citizens
working to preserve some tiny fragment of the natural world.

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